Basic Concepts

An account is created upon successful registration with a cloud service platform. The account has full access permissions for all of its cloud services and resources. It can be used to reset user passwords and grant user permissions. The account is a payment entity, which should not be used directly to perform routine management. To ensure account security, create users and grant them permissions for routine management.

An IAM user is created using an account to use cloud services. Each IAM user has its own identity credentials (password and access keys).

The account name, username, and password will be required for API authentication.

Regions are divided based on geographical location and network latency. Public services, such as Elastic Cloud Server (ECS), Elastic Volume Service (EVS), Object Storage Service (OBS), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Elastic IP (EIP), and Image Management Service (IMS), are shared within the same region. Regions are classified as universal regions and dedicated regions. A universal region provides universal cloud services for common domains. A dedicated region provides services of the same type only or for specific domains.

For details, see Region and AZ.

An AZ contains one or more physical data centers. Each AZ has independent cooling, fire extinguishing, moisture-proof, and electricity facilities. Within an AZ, computing, network, storage, and other resources are logically divided into multiple clusters. AZs within a region are interconnected using high-speed optical fibers to support cross-AZ high-availability systems.

A project corresponds to a region. Projects group and isolate resources (including compute, storage, and network resources) across physical regions. Users can be granted permissions in a default project to access all resources in the region associated with the project. For more refined access control, create subprojects under a project and purchase resources in the subprojects. Users can then be assigned permissions to access only specific resources in the subprojects.

Figure 1 Project isolation

Enterprise projects group and manage resources across regions. Resources in different enterprise projects are logically isolated. An enterprise project can contain resources of multiple regions, and resources can be added to or removed from enterprise projects.

For details about how to obtain enterprise project IDs and features, see the Enterprise Management User Guide.